Arguing Over Taliban-Criminals

Gretchen Peters (no, not that one) makes an interesting argument for regarding the Taliban as criminals:

In the last eight years, the Afghan Taliban have greatly expanded their illicit activities, morphing into a force more violent and ruthless than when they were in power from 1996 to 2001 and building up an economic empire worth almost half a billion dollars. Their activities are diverse: In some parts of the south, they collaborate with drug traffickers to dictate poppy output. They provide armed protection for opium convoys leaving Afghanistan’s farm areas and protect heroin labs along the Pakistan border. In addition, they work with kidnapping rings that have snared diplomats, journalists, U.S. contractors, and wealthy local businessmen. They cooperate with gunrunners, human traffickers, and the smuggling gangs that illegally export millions of dollars worth of Afghan antiquities.

They also extort monthly payments from legal Afghan businesses, terrorizing village shopkeepers and even nationwide cellphone providers, attacking their homes and premises if they don’t comply. District-level Taliban commanders collect fees as high as $250 per truck passing through their control zones from import-export firms and trucking companies, even “taxing” the tankers carrying jet fuel to NATO air bases in Kandahar and Bagram.

Well, err, yes. But I have two responses. First, how is this substantively different from any other insurgency? Most insurgency have ties into illicit activities. The Mujahidin in the 1980s were notorious for supporting their jihad at least in part through opium production—ironically, at the same time the U.S. was successful in getting Zia ul-Haq to curb Pakistan’s opium production, which drove prices to previously unseen heights. Indeed, the use of opium smuggling to finance the tanzims was something of an open secret, and in the 1980s U.S. officials were frank that defeating the Soviets was higher priority than curbing mujahideen opium cultivation. It was so severe that in 1981 Mujahidin Commander Nassim Akhunzada—now known as Afghanistan’s “Heroin King”—innovated a scheme of forced opium planting and the salaam payments that to this day trap opium farmers in ruinous debt cycles.

Especially given the many ways the opium trade also enriches government officials, singling out the Taliban for opprobrium over its ties to the criminal world seems a big short-sighted.

My second response is, “not quite.” As I said above, most insurgencies, almost by nature, have ties with other non- or anti-government elements like criminal gangs and smugglers guilds. In Afghanistan, again, this is a long history going back way before the Taliban arrived (and in fact, their original arrangement with the powerful shipping mafia of Kandahar and Quette played a major factor in the ease of their war, at least according to Ahmed Rashid). The idea that insurgencies can be considered interchangeable with gangs or transnational criminal groups seems to rest on faulty assumptions: Max Manwaring, one of the idea’s most well-known evangelists, specifically downplays and misconstrues the substantial differences in motivations between insurgencies and gangs, going so far as to imbue gangs with implicit political agendas very few if any actually possess. (See, for example, Max G. Manwaring (2005), “Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency,” Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute.)

While most non-state groups can be considered analogous to a certain degree, given the challenge they represent to the existence of the state itself, such blurring of the lines ignores socio-economic factors, ideology, and each group-type’s ultimate objectives—none of which are analogous. Indeed, the biggest problem with Peters’ argument for considering the criminal element of the Taliban is that, quite unlike the criminals who run the opium smuggling networks, the Taliban does not appear to be primarily profit-driven. Criminals want to maximize income, while insurgents want to govern—at the margins a semantic difference, perhaps, but one that is nevertheless vital to understanding why the differences between the two group types matter far more than the similarities (starting with the very salient observation that, despite even substantial collaboration, criminal groups and insurgents remain discrete organizations).

Then again, this is Foreign Policy, whose editor has written a book about the governance issues caused by transnational criminal groups. Not to write it off that way—I’d actually be quite interested in reading Peters’ book—just that there is probably an institutional bias to why this specific essay, which lacks the documentation, references, and space for argument a book provides, got published. While her argument here falls flat, it’s possible her book contribues substantial research into the frameworks used for analyzing gang-associated insurgency beyond the fairly shallow comparative studies on hand right now. But as it stands, I’m not buying it. I’ll read the book (anyone want to send me a review copy?) and see if it makes more sense then.

Tagged as: Afghanistan